when arlo is triggered, it should immediately text the image of the frame that triggered it

[hrothgar]

A big part of the reason I got the Arlo was to "screen" visitors when they ring at the door. Unfortunately, the app is far too slow for that. After I hear the doorbell, I have to open the Arlo app and wait what feels like forever as it signs me in and accesses the screen shot that set off the Arlo... this whole process takes far, far too long when there is someone waiting at the door.

What would make Arlo immensely more useful would be if it could text me an image of the frame that set off the motion sensor. This way I could quickly see who is at the door without having to go through the process of waiting for the Arlo app to catch up.

I found an article on how to push to a text number by converting the number to an email address, but the resulting message is just HTML code with no image.  And I know you can get an email, but that's too slow.  What I'm looking for is an immediate text of the triggering image.

I contacted support but their answer suggested that it couldn't be done.  So, two questions for the community:

1. Has anyone figured out a way to accomplish something like this?

2. If not, am I the only one who feels that Arlo is somewhat useless without a feature like this? If other people feel the same way, maybe we can put some pressure on Netgear to add this as a feature.  Any idea how to do this?

Thanks!

[TomMac]

First you have to know that Pushes come at the trigger event and email always come at the END of recording.... So if your time is set to record for 60 secs, the email comes about 75 sec from trigger

As it is now, my android pushes do show a picture taken from the beginning of the video so it's quick, like a few secs max

[jguerdat]

Tom, are the pushes with snapshot from the Smart beta camera?  My pushes don't have snapshots on non-beta cameras.

[TomMac]

You are right... sorry, disregard previous

[JamesC]

hrothgar,

For more information on what TomMac is referencing above, see here: What is Arlo Smart and how do I benefit from it?

JamesC

[Chillmiester]

JamesC that links brings us to Arlo Smart. What is this price $3.99 a month for learning? Isn't this suppose to be a built in software feature for the cameras in the near future?

[hrothgar]

Hi everyone, and thanks for the replies.

So it sounds like this feature is available with the "Arlo Smart" software upgrade?  That's good to know, but it's also disappointing. This isn't a complex machine learning task as described on that Arlo Smart link. I simply want the Arlo to take a screen grab at the moment of motion sensor triggering, and immediately push it to me (preferably by text but really I'd settle for anything). No supercomputers required! 🙂

JamesC, is there any plan to make this feature available as part of the normal Arlo software? I'm not really interested in the other aspects of Arlo Smart, so I'd be paying $48/year just for this very basic feature that, in my opinion, should be available to everyone who spent the money to buy an Arlo. Hard to justify...

Thanks!

Rich

[manfredz]

Can you sign up for Arlo Smart now?  If so how/where?

[jguerdat]

Dunno that anyone can now be involved in the ongoing beta. Likely too late to get in. You could try PMing JamesC.